Carter USM, Sultans of Ping FC, Frank and Walters – Academy, Brixton

This was the end of an era for me. Their definite last gig, no messing this time. I think it was (a record) 24th time I’d seen Carter live with an equivalent number of times for the other two bands combined too.

Although I don’t play their music much any more they still bring back strong memories of me mooching around the record shops in White Lion Street in Islington in the early 90s as I bought up everything they had on CD, cassette, even vinyl in some cases (yeah, BEFORE it was cool).

And they’re always great live and I often forget how I still remember every word to every song due to the ridiculous number of times each song was played in this house.

The final gig was called “The Last Tango In Brixton” when they announced it, but when they announced one the day before suddenly it became “The Final Comedown”

Jim Bob is writing books now and Fruitbat is in other bands and (hate to add this point) but they’re both nearer 60 than 50 now so I guess a good thing can’t go on forever – I’ll always have the memories of the albums, gigs, and all the money I spent on their stuff! Some of those shows were good too – support slots from the Frank and Walters and Sultans of Ping became de rigeur but I saw great bands like Salad, My Life Story, The Family Cat, Resque etc with Carter for the first time. I can even remember Genius Freak!

As much as I enjoyed myself I still felt like it was the right time to end it all. When you start getting lots of emails asking you to buy Carter USM socks and tea towels from the band’s manager-who-thinks-he’s-a-rockstar all the time too (which other band send out emails titled “An email from X’s manager”? It’s not about you buddy …) then they’ve probably taken it as far as it’s going to go.

The show itself was great. Carter bang on form as expected (but no Chris Barrie introducing, boo hoo), the Frank and Walters missing the opportunity AGAIN to do an early-hits-laden set that would have pleased the 5,000-strong crowd. Sultans mad and on form as ever though to redeem this.

I took a few photos but none of them came out like this dude’s pictures …

Farewell, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – forgotten heroes of 90s indie

Andrew Collins wrote this for The Guardian just after the gig:

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, a socially conscious DIY rock duo from south London who had four top 10 albums (including a No 1) and 12 top 40 singles over a 10-year career, played more than 800 gigs, headlined Glastonbury and were sued by the Rolling Stones, do not exist.

That will be empirically true after this Saturday’s instantly sold-out gig at London’s 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy, Carter’s farewell after an illustrious eight-year reunion. But it’s true in a broader sense, too. When BBC4 next retells the history of rock’n’roll and the story reaches the 1990s, after namechecking Madchester it will, with weary predictability, hymn grunge and then move straight on to Britpop. If you’re lucky, it might manage a brief shoegazing montage.

But something just as momentous happened in the early 90s that refuses to fit neatly into this narrative. And this movement is exemplified by Carter USM, a band I hold close to my bosom, have followed since 1989 and whose final shows fill me – and thousands of others – with a certain generational sadness.

(Their manager tells me 10,000 people applied for the 200 tickets made available for Carter’s recent BBC 6 Music session, “the most requested event in Maida Vale studios’ history”.)

The independent sector enjoyed salad days in the 80s, when Rough Trade launched the Smiths, Creation set the previously caustic Jesus and Mary Chain on a similar trajectory to the charts and the KLF sold a million copies of Doctorin’ the Tardis on KLF Communications. The institutionally uncool major labels began signing anything that looked alternative, often using boutique label imprints as camouflage. The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself, the Darling Buds, the Wedding Present, the House of Love, Kingmaker, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Cud found themselves on labels like RCA, Epic, Polydor, Phonogram and A&M. All it took was a buzz in the inkies and an indie chart Top 10. I don’t imagine a single one of these signings ever recouped their advance, but they had a lot of fun and sold a lot of merchandise.

Carter USM were typical of the “T-shirt bands” of that epoch: witty, wily and embraced with obsessive devotion by young, gig-going fans. Jim “Jim Bob” Morrison and Leslie “Fruitbat” Carter went from Rough Trade to Chrysalis in 1992. They were unlikely pop stars, who poked fun at their own comparatively ripe old age with their second album 30 Something. Jim’s fringe resembled a front ponytail, Fruitbat wore cycling gear; neither favoured long trousers. They produced a powerpop racket with a punk-rock electric guitar, a rasping voice, a drum machine and backing tapes. Jim’s lyrical puns were enough to make a Sun headline writer retire: 24 Hours from Tulse Hill, 101 Damnations, The Only Living Boy in New Cross, Do Re Me So Far So Good. But mainstream stardom made them cross. Fruitbat rugby-tackled Philip Schofield after a misunderstood amp-toppling finale to After the Watershed at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party, live on TV.

A cub reporter at the NME in the late 80s, I didn’t discover them (Steve Lamacq did), but I hopped aboard the bandwagon early on and surfed Carter’s wave to the stars, writing their first cover story, hitching a ride in their Transit to a post-Velvet Revolution Czech Republic, experiencing them live in New York, where they supported the briefly Midas-like EMF and, post-split, hiring Jim to perform the theme tune to my first Radio 4 sitcom. We remain on each other’s Christmas card lists, and their annual reunion shows have been a fixture in my diary since 2007.

But my fervour to see them inducted into the halls of rock history is not just personal. They represent something unfashionable but vital about a particular, commercially antagonistic era in pop, when alternative acts didn’t have to do deals with shampoo or fashion houses to get heard. With the record industry in freefall and music technically free, it’s touring that brings home the bacon. The T-shirt bands knew that almost 30-something years ago.

I asked Jim what his defining Carter memory would be, and he referred me back to the afternoon of the first reunion gig at Glasgow Barrowlands. “As I walked around the venue I felt invincible. I get the same feeling at the very end of a Carter gig when it’s impossible to not be overcome by all the love in the room. This year I might stay there until someone drags me off. Like James Brown.”

The setlist:

Back In A Tracksuit
Give Him A Ball (And A Yard Of Grass)
Veronica
Teenage Punks
2 Pints Of Rasa
Wake Up And Scratch Me
Kick Me With Your Leather Boots
Stupid Kid
Ladybug Boy
Indeed You Are
U Talk 2 Much
Where’s Me Jumper?
The Frank and Walters’ setlist:
Tony Cochrane
Trust In The Future
Fashion Crisis Hits New York
We Are The Frank And Walters
Indie Love Song
How Can I Exist
After All
Colours
The Model
If I’d Known

Finally … some nice words two days after from Jim Bob on the Carter mailing list.

THE FINAL COMEDOWN

Hello everyone,

It’s Monday now. The ringing in my ears might be permanent. I feel a bit weird. There’s a guitar strap burn mark on my neck. If I close my eyes I swear I can see strobes. My calves hurt. I think that’s more as a result of going up and down the stairs between the dressing rooms and the stage than anything else. I’m expecting the final comedown that we advertised to hit me any minute now. I’ll be like Phil Daniels going back to work after the bank holiday bag of pills, the court appearance with Sting and the you know what with Lesley Ash in the alleyway. It’s lucky that I’m self-employed or I’d end up telling my boss to stuff the franking machine right up his arse.

There is so much to be proud of from the past 7 or 8 years (I can’t count). This year was the same but more. There were the usual bar takings records but also a ‘most applications to be in a live audience at Maida Vale’ record. The 480 crowd surfers at Brixton. The sold out aftershow party at Jamm. The trending on Twitter. So much love on Facebook. Being in a position to put Mrs Jim Bob in a reserved seat next to Cillian Murphy.

Ordinarily Carter gigs pass relatively unnoticed by the outside world. There isn’t the need for any advertising and we don’t tend to do any interviews. This time though there were people in the forest when the tree fell (I’m an author, I can say things like that now) The Maida Vale session and the two hours choosing songs with Tom Robinson, the bit in the Guardian and the Independent. The trending on Twitter. Enough stuff on Facebook to make the cats and the terrorists envious. Even a good luck message from Phillip Schofield. The BBC4 music documentary makers would have had to have been in a 28 Days Later style coma (as portrayed so brilliantly by the gorgeous Cillian Murphy) to have not noticed.

Regrets, I have a few. We never did get Chris Barrie to come onstage dressed as Rimmer to do a live introduction to Surfin’ USM. We’d agreed it with him two years in a row but something always prevented it from happening at the last minute and this year thirteen Jon Beasts seemed a more fitting introduction. And those white Doctor Marten’s look a bit like clown shoes in photos. That’s it. Not a few, but two regrets.

Me and Les have made a lot of friends as a result of being in this band. Many of them worked with us and were there this weekend, both backstage and front, Crazy Carter Crew past and present but always Crazy Carter Crew. Perhaps that’s true for the audience too. I honestly couldn’t imagine a better audience than the Carter audience. The same life membership status goes for me and Les. Even though it will say on Wikipedia that we’re ‘former members of Carter’, we will still always be Jim Bob and Fruitbat from Carter. We’ll just be doing other things.

I know it probably seems a bit daft to stop something that is so wonderful and so thrilling and fun and rewarding but it’s also great to be able to stop while it still is all of those things. In spite of all the tears – seeing skinhead men crying is incredibly infectious – the weekend was I think truly joyous. Perhaps happy endings aren’t just for fairy tales and massage parlours.

Jim Bob x